HR functions are particularly vital

Miss Axe- A vital function

I got a call from my Mom (Constance) today. "Gloria, did you not tell me that you have an assistant named Miss Cynthia Axe? Heavens, she appeared on the CBC today in one of my favourite programs, All About People". 

Dear readers, CBC is the Canadian Broadcasting Authority. Unlike my worldly late father Pierre Elliot who watched the BBC and US channels, Mom watches the CBC.

"Gloria, I did not know that firing people can be such a science! Heavens, it appears to me to be a ghastly way to earn money. Miss Axe claims that she does the actual work, whilst her colleague, a Canadian girl named Gloria Ramsbottom-Lemieux, does all the propaganda and sloganeering". 

Btw, my Mom uses the word "heavens" quite a lot.

Mom continued, "Anyway my dear daughter, I am proud that you allow your staff to expose themselves on the media. This gives you publicity as well. Mind you, her dressing is rather scanty". 

Readers, I never told you that Mom repeats herself. So the next thing she said was, "Gloria, did you know I saw your assistant, the young Ms Axe, on the CBC today?"

Finally Mom said, I just adore the HR melody that the CBC played  as they introduced Ms Axe. I never knew "Manpower" was so vital.

Teaching our staff about Korean culture

When I arrived at work this morning, I happened to pass by the office of our CEO Stan and I heard some yelling and screaming.

Since I am Stan's HR business partner, my office is right next to his!  As I entered my room, I glued my ear to the wall, in line with my core value of "gathering big data".

CEO Stan told Comrade Carl Marks, head of Emerging Technologies, that that he had received a call from a Korean client's CEO who described our new product was a "piece of pure shit"; only 5 out of 40,888 features were operative. 

A very enraged Stan bellowed, "Comrade Carl, go to the customer site and solve the problem, and don't come back without a solution. Now get out of my office and get on a plane, Comrade Carl."

Comrade Carl came into my room, smiling as if he had just smoked a joint in our parking lot. `Gloria, I am sending 4 engineers to a customer site tonight. They need training about Korean culture, some added engineering skills in Internet of Things,communication skills, etiquette and a piece on managing customer expectations. They will leave to Seoul in 6 hours, so kindly have this training delivered to them in a webinar directly to their cellphone on the way to the airport. Spasiba``.

Comrade Carl has a sexual fetish for the Russian language and I have learnt that ``spasiba`` means thank you.

Immediately, I texted a training vendor in Lesotho, who had asked me for an ``opportunity to prove myself`` and I ordered the webinar. I charged the vendor $1000. 

I asked Hugh White (from Diversity) to do some `quality control` on the webinar, because the vendor is from Ebola stricken Africa.

Then I opened my Blackberry Passport and read the following text.

• To all our staff and management! We cannot be successful as long as HR does not understand the working class and promote their well being. Our product is a pearl yet our engineers are sent abroad to deal with every client whimper and whinge. HR does not advocate for the rights of engineers, kibinimat. We need a union. I am leading a 3 day strike. Starting now.

Comrade Carl

I texted the Lesotho vendor, and cancelled the webinar. 

Aligning with common sense

HR's role is to maintain a civil dialogue in English and ensure sanity.

The fact that our newest product is not "stable" is causing a non wow nightmare. Our product has 30,987 revenue impacting bugs. Most of our treacherous client base wish to uninstall it.

Chief nerd Comrade Carl Mark's personality was never all that stable to begin with. This crisis has made things worse. Comrade Carl Marks claims that product bugs are a result of rumor mongering, not big data.

And Comrade Carl  is convinced that the lack of product stability is a service issue, not an engineering problem. 

There is also a linguistic problem in R&D which impacts product quality, if you ask me. Carl's staff is 39% Russian, and the rest of the engineers are Indians, Chinese and Middle Easterners. Very  people actually understand the English language product specs.....and this explains a lot of product issues, from an HR perspective.

Two hours each day, Comrade Carl has been seen reading a book on the Mossad, which is a foreign version of the infamous and evil KGB, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the defunct Scorpions, and the beloved CIA. Comrade Carl apparently believes our clients can be "convinced"  into believing our product is "a pearl".

Our CEO Stan believes that an HR intervention is needed to "straighten Comrade Carl out" so that he will not wait for miracles, but fix the bugs! Stan instructed me to hire more English speaking engineers because he believes that "people who speak English well generally have more common sense." Hugh White (a white heterosexual) from Diversity disagrees.

The ladies of HR and Hugh White from Diversity started enforcing our global "English Language  Only" policy in the cafeteria, to get more traction around aligning ourselves with common sense.

I may need a vendor with a background in psychiatry and appreciative inquiry, who works pro bono.

Crisis intervention in our R&D department as shit hits the fan

Union on the way?

Two weeks before product release, there is a non wow situation in IoT - Big Data. 50 engineers (30 of them named Svetlana) have all resigned tentatively, unless they get raises. 

In another development, product managers also refuse to visit clients in nearby Japan unless they fly business class. This is big data.

And R&D Chief Comrade Carl Marks' only comment to this is: blacha mucha, which is an evil word in Russian. 

In a management meeting Comrade Carl said this morning, "now that we need our employees, we are going to be fucked big time, thanks to Gloria's myopia as HR manager". Then Carl added, "I hope we get unionized!" 

Immediately, I set up a response team consisting of Cynthia Axe, Head of our Involuntary Early Bird Retirement Team, and that white heterosexual boy Hugh White, who runs Diversity.

Hugh will seize the workers passports for clerical review whenever possible; Ms Axe will provide a notarized promise that no one will be fired by text.

I will need to become involved-so I plan to "transform" my relationship with Comrade Carl into a business partnership, based on some appreciative inquiry, agility and a portion of big data, with some vodka.

I am also looking for a more challenging company. This role is starting to bore me. 
I  have heard that there are opportunities in the Faroe Islands.

2019 Learning Goals

Today in our senior management meeting planning session, I presented the "deliverables" of a certain Samuel Snake, our OD and Talent Manager (temporary) manager.

Why is Samuel Snake temporary? Well, he is the son in law of our chairman, and is under my rigorous  scrutiny, after I noticed that he and a certain R&D Chief Comrade Carl Marks smoke pot together in the parking lot. 

What makes me all the more suspicious is that Samuel Snake takes Russian lessons "so I can build a personal relationship with Comrade Carl", noted Snake. As readers of this blog know, Comrade Carl is our American chief nerd, who loves the Russian language.

I should stop rambling, as my Dad used to tell me. "Stay focused Gloria, or you'll get nowhere".

Here is the slide I presented about Samuel Snakes's L&D deliverables.

L&D  Deliverables

Samuel Snake

•Ensure all our staff uses our new German blockchain 

•5 wow wow  employee engagement slogans generated daily by HR ladies

•One integrated 90 second pro-bono webinar for both On-boarding and  Involuntary Early Retirement

•“Core Values” software, which updates itself weekly.

•Accent training to understand Glasgow English

•Career planning hype (grounded in big data) increased by 3 %

•Weekly lecture on “Value of HR Partnership" under Gloria’s helmswomanship with all departments

Follow me @GRamsbottom

British blockchains are part of our morning buffet

Our core values: weekly update

Here are the weekly update of our scared core values:

• Work work work work life balance
• Wear T shirt that says  "I love  British Blockchains"
• Deference to CEO 
• People (on Wednesdays)
• Diversity and good English 
• Being brief, positive & sophisticated, like a tweet.
• Leverage big data to satisfy Stan's fetish
• Admiration for HR business partnership, including voting for HR as the most valued department in our annual survey.
• Being perky

Please ensure these eternal, weekly values are sprinkled in your speech.

Hang them in your cubicle.

Use them as  your screen saver.
And most of all, say "in line with our core values"!

I will send them out as a text message as well, backed up by a Whatsapp, BBM, Viber and email.

Follow me on Twitter @GRamsbottom

Hiring an OD change agent-and keeping him on a leash

Name of Role: Head of Training, Talent Management, Organizational Development and Knowledge Management

Reporting to: SVP HR Ms Gloria Ramsbottom-Lemieux

Role Description: Compliance to the direction I provide

Skills:

• Semi strategic and very tactical
• Slavish loyalty to boss
• Working mother with 3-5 children with no career aspirations
• Proven negotiation skill with hotels
• Proven skills in wow wow wow-ism and rah rahing
• Ability to feign understanding of business
• Native and fluent English skills, with a smattering of French
• Ability to understand the various accents in our Engineering department

Surprised? No need to be! 

Here's how it happened. CEO Stan texted me to come to his office. His wife (Wifey) had just read an article titles "Change From Within"; the article was a case study of a company which was "totally turned around" by a program driven by an internal "change agent" in HR. 

Stan gave me the article to read (it is a one pager) and immediately told me: "Let's give this a try, Ramsbottom". 

Then Stan added, "Chairman Ed's son-in-law, young Samuel Snake, appears to be a good candidate for setting up such a department "under your auspices, Gloria".

I reminded Stan about something he preferred I did not know (that has to do with him and a certain Ms Cynthia Axe). 

Ever the flexible CEO, Stan said, "As you wish Gloria. But set up the department and at least use Samuel Snake as an intern. That's an order".

An order is an order. So, I put together the above job description & published it. 

There are now almost 3 thousand people a day who read this blog, even in Indonesia, Scotland, the tip of Africa, Saudi Arabia (mais oui), Germany and even Denmark. Please refer people to me. I will accept a candidate from an offshore location, in line with my core value of "cheap labour".

I don't pay a placement fee, but I am a  pleasure to work with.

How to break into HR and start a wow career

Almost never be non discrete

I gave a lecture "How to Break into HR and start a wow career" this very morning to a Community College. The audience was a secretarial course, interspersed  with a few people from  a Purchasing and Supply Chain course. 

This was the ideal milieu to lecture to. Milieu is a French word.I delivered the lecture by Skype, as I was driving into work. (I was texting at the same time, on 2 phones!)

Here were the main points of what I said. They are like 10 commandments, although I do not frequent houses of worship.

1. Love of people is almost absolutely critical, and pleasing your boss is even more critical, without an `almost``.  If your boss views  people as spare parts, then he needs to watch a webinar on soft skills.
2. Texting is the essence communication. Texting (sending sms) is a mission critical skill for an HR manager. 400 words a minute on a Blackberry Priv is industry standard. 
3. COPensation and travel policy can be relegated to Finance because no one is ever happy and people need to love HR.
4. Big Data, if you ever understand what it is, may, or may not, be important. I think big data is erotic.
5. Designing Voice Menus for HR services is more important than texting.
6. Practice sitting down at a mahogany table, elegantly but with assertiveness. Sit like a ``lady``.
7. Hire someone like Cynthia Axe and pay her well, that your days may be long upon the Earth.
8. Don't use buzzwords; use words with impact like ``paperless``, ``stretch goals``, "leverage", "global", "internet-of-things", "sustainable" all the time.
9. Be discrete.
10. When you hear rumors, text them to your boss, although you must remain discrete.

Speed Coaching

Today, our CEO Stan got some speed coaching about how to deal with the semi wow feedback he is getting on our new software release.

Speed coaching is good for HR because the coach disappears quickly.

The cost effective speed coach used 1-2-3 methodology:

   1 minute to define the problem

   2 minutes to listen to the solution and 

   3 minutes to submit the invoice and hope to get paid

Here is a "blow by blow" description of the coaching, in line with my core values of "worshiping events which leave HR in control".

CEO Stan met with the coach at 8.00 am and by 8.04 am the speed coach was in his car on the way home, in no way challenging HR's dominance.

• Stage One: Stan told the Coach that 3 clients have purchased our product which is unstable and has a negative user experience.

• Stage Two: the speed coach spit out 3 action items:

          1-promise next release with better functionality 
          2-blame the client for being so demanding
          3-use the term "big data" liberally

• Stage Three: Coaching vendor received deferred cheque.

It hits the fan

May you live in interesting times-a Chinese curse.

Following the introduction of our "modified", wow and cost effective health plan, the compulsory use of the global language of English in our global dining hall, the IT-related delay of salary benefits to a "few" of our beloved employees, and the growing unpopularity of a certain Ms Axe (Cynthia), the Head of our Early Bird Retirement Plan, civil discourse yesterday was mildly impacted.

8 pizzas were hurled in Ms Axe's direction; Axe received violent emails written in tribal dialects like Russian, Chinese, Tamil and Hebrew; English language signs were torn down.

Two gay couples then got married on our premises, an employee took out a prayer mat and prayed in mid day, and the Big Data secretary answered the phone with "Praise the Lord-you have reached Big Gail from Big Data, how can I help you, God willing".

I have just left the "crisis management room" (with a mahogany table) where CEO Stan, Wifey, Ms Axe and Winston Wu (IT), whose grandfather was born in Sha Tin, Hong Kong, Kowloon side. I also attended.

We decided on these steps we are taking to return to civility.

1) R&D and Sales staff will have a cooking class and outdoor training. These powerful tools solve 98.7% of all organizational issues without the need for consultants.

2) HR will "do a study" on health treatment alternatives.

3) Cynthia Axe will continue her grisly role, but she will  fire her useless Reputation Coach and hire a new one.

4) Dogs will now be allowed on premise.

5) HR will "monitor" the level of civil discourse in a timely fashion.

6) English language lessons will be axe-cellerated. Russian employees  will be "thinned out". 

7) Three new blockchains will be deployed to augment trust. 

All this will be done in line with our core values of civility and serving the status quo.